Italian Neorealism and Global Cinema

Emerging out of the ashes of Fascism, Italian Neorealist films were inexorably tied to the social, political, and economic reorganization of the nation in the immediate postwar years. Coupled with the advent of new cinematic techniques that characterized the genre (the use of non-actors, natural lighting, on-location shooting, and the absence of melodrama), the reassertion of local and regional realities in Neorealist films marked a sharp break from Fascist-era depictions of a national ideal. By injecting presentations of poverty and class conflict into the urban setting and deconstructing the rural idyll, Neorealism offered a new means of imagining national unity based on class consciousness and consent as opposed to coercion. The attempts to present the "social truths" of the postwar period revolved around the transformation of the iconic images central to Fascist constructions of the nation. Luchino Visconti's La terra trema (1948) is discussed as emblematic of the shared moral and stylistic unity of the genre.

Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 2013

When we observe the influence of neorealism, in the first instance we need to consider its humanist vision which implies that we cannot rely on elements and aspects of the narrative but we have to rely on extratextual informationi.e., information which surpasses the narrative text. I will discuss examples of world cinema that have appropriated the humanist vision of neorealism and the ways in which this vision affects the structuring of the fabula. This can be seen most prominently in Chinese, Iranian, Indian, African, Mexican and Taiwanese films (especially the films of Hou Hsiao Hsien). The point of departure (and I am following Mieke Bal here) is that the fabula, even more generally than the syuzhet makes describable a segment of reality that is broader than that of narrative texts only. Fabulas always make describable segments of reality that are broader than that of narrative texts only, but in the case of neorealist films this is more pronounced. The specificity of the fabula in neorealist films is its reliance on extratextual information as well as its reliance on the focalized world view. The relation between the subject that perceives and that which is perceived invests the story with subjectivity. By the same token focalization cannot take place without the act of narrating. Considering that the narrational process presupposes a text, or rather a medium such as film through which the story is narrated, it is impossible that the viewers perceive the narrated content directly. That content is subjectivized, represented, framed, filtered through a specific vision. In this concrete text we can speak of the humanist vision.

The Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies, 10: 1 , pp.117-121., 2021

Film Style / Lo stile cinematografico, edited by Enrico Biasin, Giulio Bursi, Leonardo Quaresima, Forum, 2007

This work focuses on the unusual relationship between style and technique starting in the early years of Italian Neorealism. It might appear uncommon to talk about style when looking at that all too brief period of Italian cinema marked by an extraordinary historical moment. Bazin himself describes the context as an exceptional one: " the films of Rossellini or De Sica owed the fact that they were major works, masterpieces, simply to a fortuitous combination of form and subject matter ". On the other hand, we cannot forget as has recently been written, that Neorealism can be understood as a true and proper stylistic system. The framework of this system, which can be said to constitute almost a kind of rhetoric, is aimed at the building of effects of reality.

Humanities and Social Sciences Review, 2012

Cinema contributes to construction of specific meaning and value systems by means of cultural representations. Those cultural representations also present frameworks within which we can have knowledge of expressions of a specific period of time, and they are formed within a relation to social history. Italian neorealism has been a movement which by taking up Italian society and human life after World War II shows how art proceeds as a form of information. On the other hand, movies in Turkish cinema, especially those which produced in 70s, are mostly influenced by Italian neo-realism. The main points that distinguish those movies from Italian movies occur in the context of cultural resources and social-historical basis by which they are supported. Within this scope, this study aims to present the relation between Turkish cinema and Italian neorealism through their similarities and differences. A comparative analysis of Vittorio De Sica's Ladri Di Biciclette / Bicycle Thieves (1948) and Yilmaz Guney's Umut / Hope (1970) has been made within this study.

This polemical article objects to the pervasive use of realism as a value or prescriptive term in the writing of Italian cinema history. It also offers a dissenting appraisal of the ‘institution’ of neorealism: the body of critical work and discourse that constructs neorealism as the ethical and aesthetic centre of Italian cinema. The discursive recourse to neorealism has become the essential authoritative gesture: to fail to refer to it is to risk seeming ignorant, philistine and most of all politically suspect. We contest this insidious common sense of Italian cinema studies, a common sense that is underpinned by a notion of auteurist ‘paternity’ as the default explanatory metaphor of Italian film history, and which leads to a dismissive tone in the discussion of genre films, not to mention a disdain for the audience for such films. We critique the idea of cinema as a ‘mirror’ of the nation found in some of the pre-eminent scholars of Italian cinema, and we finish by recommending a moratorium on the mention of neorealism for at least five years. What would a silence on realism allow us to reveal about other modes and genres? The article is followed by replies from Giulia Fanara (Rome), Millicent Marcus (Yale) and Robert Gordon (Cambridge), and then the authors’ own short response to the replies.

Having abandoned Soviet Realism in the late 1940s, the recently formed Yugoslav fi lm industry looked elsewhere for suitable models with which to develop a national style of fi lm. One option was to imitate the characteristics of other progressive cinemas, such as Italian neorealism. For this reason, in the second half of the 1950s, aspiring Yugoslav directors like Veljko Bulajić were sent to study to the Italian Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografi a in Rome, while Italian neorealist directors such as Giuseppe De Santis were invited to work in the Yugoslav fi lm industry. Moreover, fi lm coproductions with western European countries such as West Germany, France, and Italy, provided a profi table way of acquiring technical and stylistic know-how. Accordingly, this essay focuses on a the case of the West German-Yugoslavian-Italian co-production of František Čáp’s Sand, Love and Salt in order to examine how co-productions were used by the Yugoslav fi lm industry to test out new fi lm styles and genres, in this case by adopting the “lowbrow” neorealism of Italian melodrama and comedy.